GameCentral talks to the creator of Oddworld and gains a deep, and often disturbing, insight into how the games industry really works…

This was supposed to be a simple preview of Oddworld: New ‘N’ Tasty!, an HD remake of PS one classic Abe’s Oddysee. But at the same time we were given the chance to interview Lorne Lanning, the co-founder of publisher Oddworld Inhabitants and a man who purposefully abandoned the video games industry following the release of Stranger’s Wrath (already available as a HD remake) in 2005.

You can discover the reasons for his bold decision, and his recent return, in the interview below, which shines an uncomfortable light on the way many games publishers conduct their business; and the real reason that ‘indie developer’ doesn’t quite mean the same thing today that it used to.

As for New ‘N’ Tasty it’s out in just over two weeks time, so you’ll be able to experience that for yourself very shortly. The original game was inspired by 16-bit classic Flashback and was the first game set in the expansive Oddworld universe. It’s a 2.5D platform puzzler, where you must guide the hapless Abe to safety – and prevent him and the rest of his race from becoming fast food takeaways.

Abe can’t defend himself directly but he is able to talk to others of his kind, and can posses some enemies for a brief period. That adds a small shooter element to the game but most of your progress is achieved by setting up traps and using the environment and creatures around you to your advantage.

The core gameplay is the same as it’s always been, but expanded with more dialogue options and less restrictive level design (the original was only flip screen). And as you can see the game looks fantastic, with some gorgeous visuals that represent one of the most ambitious updates since the Resident Evil remake.

We’ll have a full review as soon as we get our hands on the finished game but for now here’s our insight into how the game was made, and why it isn’t being published by anyone other than Oddworld themselves…

GC: The thing that fascinates me about your exit from the games industry is that it was completely your own choice, despite Oddworld still being a big deal at the time. But why exactly did you stop making games at that point?

LL: Well, we’d had enough of the terms. We’d had enough of what was happening. And what was happening was quite simply if you wanted to build big expensive games, and you were getting them funded by a publisher, you were basically giving up your company. I mean that’s it, that’s the nutshell of how the industry changed.

As games got more expensive for development they did not get more expensive at retail, right? The $50 game has been going on since the NES days, or $60. But the games started costing millions and millions more [to make]. When I started making games people were on average building games for $500,000, maybe a $1 million, on the Sega Mega Drive and SNES. We come in on the PlayStation era and it’s like, oh, it’s going to go to multi-million dollars. And there were a lot of concerns about how teams would grow and all that stuff.

We got in and you had to start selling a lot more units, but you could sell a million units and the developer would still not see one royalty cheque. And that only started getting worse. As the money got higher the terms for the developer got worse. So you’re doing a lot more work for a lot less reward and, what I also didn’t see coming, was that for the most part the big publishers didn’t want to have anything to do with you if they couldn’t own your IP. Or if they didn’t see a path to acquisition.

Now, when we created the company we didn’t create the company to sell the company, right? But you would basically have these deals where if you wanted to sign a $15 million development deal you were simultaneously signing an acquisition deal – if you had success they would be able to buy you at… and they would leverage the power of that money.

And I looked at that and I said, ‘That’s not why I started building these games’. I don’t care for some of these relationships, I think they’re very unfair. And I don’t think they’re good for the industry, the development community, or the customer. And if that’s how it’s gonna be I’d rather not play, period.

GC: That’s what was worst about it really, the assumption that that sort of thing probably goes on all the time.

LL: It does, it does. So we were one of the few that just had a different philosophy and it’s like, we’ll talk to the industry like adults. We’ll say, ‘This is why we don’t want to play any more’. And without getting into names or who did what that was basically the trend. And what do we have? We have worlds of sequels, and really big high dollar value titles that new gamers are not that interested in because they’re basically just shooters.

GC: It certainly looks that way when you come to E3.

LL: [laughs] So we saw that happen and what I did is I created the company, with my partner Sherry McKenna, on the idea that we would be creating a universe the way that Jim Henson built a universe, the way that George Lucas built a universe, the way that Walt Disney built one, the way that Warner Bros. built a universe.

And we thought we could do that organically, we thought we could do that with successes. But the fact is I sold over 5 million games at retail and I never saw one royalty cheque. Now if you go around and ask the rest of the developers who say, ‘Oh, we sold a million units!’ Ask them how many royalty cheques they’ve had and it’ll be, ‘Oh, well that’s a sore spot’.

GC: I didn’t realise you didn’t get any royalties at all, I thought it was at least dependent on the publishing deal.

LL: It is, but you have to audit to find out if that money’s legitimate or not. And so there was a case that we audited and gee, what do you know?

GC: I think I can guess.

LL: Millions and millions of dollars of error not in our favour. Now fortunately someone told us to do that, and did the same thing, and that’s ultimately how we got the company back. Because when we were able to prove that things were not what they should be then it was ‘pay us or give us the company back’, very simple. And so that’s how we got the company back, 100 per cent.

And now in terms of that, what are you gonna do? Digital distribution wasn’t really happening in 2005. We made Stranger’s Wrath, the audience loved it, my peers in the industry didn’t even know it released; and we were working with a company that just wanted to acquire us. [EA, in case you were wondering – GC] Regardless of the fact they won’t admit that, that’s exactly what was going on.

And so whatever the reasoning the appeal had been lost. It’s not that I didn’t want to build games, I just didn’t want to be a slave. I don’t want to be a slave to these guys who are making tons of money while the developers are not. Look what happened to Infinity Ward, how much they had to sue to get this [indicates small amount with his thumb and forefinger] relative to games that were making this [indicates large amount with his hands].

GC: That’s not going to show up on the recorder you know.

LL: [laughs] So, that was a trend that was happening. A lot of the people who don’t know the stories… the stories will never be written. I’ll never get into the details because there’s a lot of legal implications. If you’ve ever been through a development deal or building your own company you understand quite well now, all those legal implications.

Because you had to go through contracts, you probably spent $100,000 on attorneys to help you understand them and get them signed. So it’s complicated and nobody’s really gonna talk about that stuff and I don’t even really like talking about that stuff as much as the question ‘Why did you stop then?’ That’s why I stopped then, with the hope… you see what we did was we secured the ownership of the IP.

GC: I remember you said you were going to do the animated movies and everything.

LL: Well, we hope to. And we had a movie deal, but 2008 happened with the financial crash and we had a R-rated, CG animated film that was a $40 to $60 million budget. But 2008 happening the way it did, and what happened to Hollywood and financing, you could tell that the writing was on the wall and that’d we’d never actually release that film. So we didn’t really follow through. But we still have it, if we were to build, and we still have this property if we want to build on that.

But what we ultimately did is we chose to take a bet. I mean we tried a few other things, but we held onto the property, we didn’t sell the property, we didn’t sell the company, and the money was there. There was a lot of money there to do that, and we said, ‘You know, we believe more in the idea of what we’re building than on the typical exit strategy of how you make millions of dollars’. And so we said, ‘Well, let’s wait. Let’s sit on our games and let’s wait until digital distribution starts coming up and maybe people will like these older games, and we’ll put those out and if they can start generating cash, revenue, then we can start reinvesting.

And whatever we capture we’ll start to figure out what we can repackage or what we can HD-up, or what we might convert to Vita or convert to PlayStation from Xbox. We’ll do that and we’ll get to know the audience better, because today we can… I mean when Oddworld started most people didn’t even know what WWW meant, right?

GC: Were there websites then?

LL: There was the very beginning, 1994. People were still just talking about it, there wasn’t video, there wasn’t really images. So at that time, in 2008, we started bringing the property back. And the audience was basically supportive. They liked the games, they would even buy the games on Steam – I mean Abe, the original is still selling on Steam every day. It’s a low price point and all but word of mouth was positive and people say it still holds up! I mean it doesn’t hold up on the big screen [laughs] but as game, as an entertaining game, it was hanging in there.

And basically, almost a couple of million units later in game sales on digital networks we were able to fund some new development, and ultimately that led to New ‘N’ Tasty. Which is quite literally most of that profit back into this game, which is still not a brand new game – because it’s built on the original classic – but it’s brand new from the ground up and it stays true to the integrity of the original game; but we tried to bring it into the 21st century with more humour, more entertainment value, without losing the heart of what it was really about.

So bringing us to today we basically want to be self-financed, or better terms; but the old triple-A publishing deal terms, with big publishers on big games, we really just have no interest in. I mean, as a designer, an artist, as a creative – sure, I’d like to build really big, great, adventurous stuff. But the terms are so unappealing that it’s just not worth it. You know? It’s just not worth it. I’ve worked too hard in my life to just make other people rich and drive a team into the ground.

Oddworld: New ‘n’ Tasty! – 100% indie

GC: Well, that’s a hell of an answer. I wish you’d gone into more detail though.

Both: [laughs]

GC: Now I fear that Bethesda story is even more likely to be true.

LL: What was it?

GC: Well, it is just a rumour, you understand. I don’t know whether it’s true. But the suggestion is that the game was almost finished and then ZeniMax [Bethesda’s parent company] started pretending the developer, Human Head, were missing their milestones, so they didn’t get paid. The idea being they could then buy them up for a cheap price, but instead Human Head went on strike. Apparently they did something similar with Arkane Studios [makers of Dishonored], where they were loaning them money just to purposefully get them in debt. I mean, like you say, you never find out if these things are true, but I do know ZeniMax owns Arkane now and Prey 2 never did come out…

LL: That’s a standard play. That’s not a unique story. Without going over who did what to who through the 20 years I’ve been in the business, that’s not a unique story at all. In fact that became more of a common practise… I’m not commenting on Bethesda because I don’t know the story but what you’re telling me is a rumour, I’m not pointing fingers at anyone as much as… as a practise for the industry that was not uncommon.

GC: That’s just terrible, to hear you say that.

LL: Because as teams grew resources became more valuable, teams became larger, big companies needed 2,000 people in their stable of talent and so often times they would be more interested in acquisitions then they would be in publishing third party titles.

GC: This is why we don’t have big name independent developers any more. In fact there are so few of them the word now basically means something else now.

LL: Yeah, yep. And so this is why you’re seeing the big migration to ‘indie’, right? In these two rooms [we’re in an area of the PlayStation stand where all the indie titles are housed, right next to a similar area on the Xbox stand – GC] how many people have worked for big publishers? Quite a few of them, right? And how many work for big developers or ambitious triple-A projects? There’s a lot of that experience here. But they’d rather be in control of their own destiny and they’d rather take the risk and maybe have a possible great upside, than definitely not and maybe just a bonus at the end of the job – even if your game sells a billion dollars worth of product.

GC: Do you regard yourself as an indie developer, in the modern sense of the word?

LL: Well, ah, independent in that we are 100 per cent independent. We are self-financed, we are self-published, and that’s really what it means, so… but this is the thing, there’s a bit of a stigma now…

GC: Exactly, nowadays people think indie and they think of something that looks like a NES game.

Lorne Lanning is quite the silver fox

LL: Yeah. But in film we don’t think that way, right? Because in film the best picture every year, at the Academy Awards, is usually going to independent films; because they have richer stories, because they didn’t have a $200 million marketing budget that said you need to be a s***** movie like Transformers or Godzilla. Or we hire all the best effects companies and we make a big pile of **** and we sell it to you for $200 million worth of marketing and you go to the first weekend and you go, ‘This sucks, no-one else should go see it’. Which is what just happened to Godzilla, right?

GC: [laughs] I haven’t seen it. Someone told me not to bother.

LL: [laughs] The indie doesn’t have to deal with that pressure. Now, once you’re at the level of a $200 million it’s gonna have a $150 million marketing campaign, once you’re in that pressure you’ve got basically teams of people that are second-guessing every creative decision. ‘Is that gonna resonate with the audience? ‘How how often does that really add up to a better product? Very seldom.

So in the indie… independent league, let’s use movies and music as the best example, right? Almost all DJs are indies, right? Some of the greatest music being made is in the electronica space today, all the indie groups they’re blooming more and more and more, we’re seeing more and more unique music, and we’re seeing fewer sales to keep bands alive for longer, right?

DJs, they’ve figured out that if they have a buying audience of 15,000 or even 10,000 people that will buy a single, that they can stay in business and make music for the year. That’s like saying, ‘If I can’t book a concert hall I can’t be a professional musician’. It’s a whole different thing, so you come back to ‘Why am I doing this in the first place?’ You like being creative, you like making things, you like making things that people enjoy. Hopefully they really enjoy it, right?

GC: And there are a lot of great-looking indie games nowadays. Your game looks great, things like No Man’s Sky looks great…

LL: I think what we’ve become is triple-A indie, or mid tier.

GC: The mid tier developers are the ones that definitely died over the last few years.

LL: Yep, they either got acquired or they went out of business. Because of the terms we described.

GC: So are you happy to fill that niche now? With games that look and play as good as a retail title but are actually completely independent.

LL: With self-publishing I’ve sold more copies of Stranger’s Wrath than the publisher did originally.

GC: Really? Wow. Although that almost says as much about EA as it does you.

LL: [laughs] The same game, years later, because I had to wait for the rights to expire. Their rights to expire. We put it out there on digital, lower price point, and that’s turned more units than it ever did.

Oddworld: New ‘n’ Tasty! – will it create a second dawn for Oddworld?

GC: So that’s where the lion’s share of the budget for New ‘N’ Tasty has come from?

LL: Yes, back into this. We’ve been rolling it all back in. I mean I don’t even take a salary, quite literally. I’m hoping for big pay-offs, I’m hoping the audience gets behind us… if you’ve seen the game there’s a lot of care. There’s a lot of craftsmanship and love, and I think that goes with the brand.

GC: So what’s your best case scenario? I imagine if this does well you’ll be looking towards making a wholly original game, but how big do you want to get? I’m guessing you don’t want to turn yourself into a 800-man sequel factory?

LL: We have no desire to do that, none whatsoever. So, the big publishers are businesses that have investors… I mean, think more Pink Floyd; where you have a band and if they make music that’s a hit that’s great because they now have more means to more hits, if they still have the chops to do it. And so our plan is not to grow to 200 people and destroy some publisher and take their marketshare.

Our plan is to build great product that we enjoy building, be able to expose that to people that enjoy it, that feel it’s worth the value – we always want to deliver more value than price, you know? And if we can do that with success, so what is success? If New ‘N’ Tasty does 250,000 units we should be able to initiate Exoddus in the same way. At 500,000 units I can start building new IP.

GC: That seems attainable, those aren’t crazy numbers.

LL: It’s thinking more conservatively. On Stranger’s Wrath, that would’ve had to sell almost 2 million units before we would see royalty one. Now, today, as an independent, a game that’s $10… I mean there are games here on this show floor today that are $60 and will not have that value…

GC: I think I’ve played some of them.

LL: [laughs] But we’re just trying to say, ‘Look, there’s a reasonable mid tier pricing that is not about us having an 80 person development company, it’s just about us having good product that’s a reasonable price’. At this higher than you’d expect from ‘indie’. Because as an industry we’ve basically learned the value of indie, but like I said you compare it to movies, you compare it to music…

GC: I can just imagine people being surprised this looks like a ‘real’ game, instead of 8-bit retro.

LL: Well, this is what I think happened to the industry. I think indie was basically, and I don’t mean this in any derogatory way, but indie was basically a lot of guys that wanted to build games, that were largely doing them themselves and they didn’t want to work for companies or they couldn’t get a job; and so they weren’t building big games and so they built little games.

But what’s happened with digital distribution is that people who know how to build big games are figuring out, ‘Hang on, we can do better at maybe funding our own games, smaller, less ambitious but more unique and interesting. And we can sell them directly, we don’t need a publisher. When that happened the game changed.

And so now you see a lot of the people, they don’t want to be with big publishers, they want to be indie. Because they’re seeing games like Monument Valley and The Room, just these little games that have really taken off.

[PR woman tries to coax us away]

Oddworld: New ‘n’ Tasty! – at least it’ll be better than the Flashback remake

GC: I think we’re being asked to stop, but just one last question – something I’ve always wondered and I think you might have some insight on. Given what an impact indie games can have nowadays I’m always surprised that the big publishers don’t just employ half a dozen students, or whoever, just lock them in a room and tell them to make whatever they want. Maybe they’ll come up with nothing but surely the chance they’ll come up with a new Minecraft is well worth the risk for such a tiny team – when they’ve got whole studios making nothing but DLC. But they never do, they just greenlight another sequel to a franchise that’s clearly on a downward slide…

LL: A lot of is scale, it’s purely business. Meaning, if you have a huge organisation an indie success is not necessarily enough money to really move your dial for Wall Street to care. And so how much effort are you going to put into that?

GC: If they make a new Minecraft that’s certainly worth the effort, and for what is to the publisher practically no cost.

LL: Well, what you’d see is that the best people in the company would want to be on that 10-man team.

GC: [laughs] I never thought of that, now that’s probably the real answer right there.

LL: Yeah, well the same question’s been asked of the film industry, right? Why does Paramount not have little indie groups or funding for college students? It’s because it’s too small. But what that’s done is it creates an opportunity, it creates a niche for us. Where we say, ‘We don’t need to sell 4 million units to come back and break even and make good on their $100 million marketing campaign that was spent on Destiny or whatever. All we need is this many sales at this lower price tag’.

And you know what? We’re still in business and we can fund another game. And if you’re… let’s put it in a musician’s context. If you’re a musician making another album is more important to you than making millions and millions of dollars, right?

GC: Well you would hope the same is true of most game developers too.

LL: Yes, but what happened to the industry is that it became only millions and millions of dollar product that was going to be supported on big consoles by big publishers, and now you see what’s going on. Like EA say, ‘We’re only going to focus on three major IPs a year’. Activision: three major IPs a year. Because…

GC: I just get so depressed when I see a new game and it’s so obvious it’s not the product of any kind of creative impulse. It’s just the accountant telling the marketing guy what’s needed and then the developer being told to make it as quickly as possible.

Oddworld: New ‘n’ Tasty! – things sure have changed in 17 years.

LL: Yeah, but you know it’s entertainment. Because television is that way, movies is that way, music is that way… what happens is the beasts get big and then they’re public companies and they’re all about growth. So we’re not about growth, we’re about quality and loyalty, right? We want to stay loyal to our quality and we want our quality to appeal to the audience, and we want the audience to be loyal to that. And if we have that then we should have synergy that keeps the coffers growing, which gives us more and more money.

So let’s say that New ‘N’ Tasy, by some chance, sells a million units at a reasonable price, then we have a lot of money. And we have a lot more choices. Now, we’re not going to build something that’s gonna compete with Destiny, because we’re not going to have the marketing, right? But we might build something that’s $10 or $20 million dollars, if we were selling that many units.

And if that many people supported it we would be capturing those people to try and keep them in the loop of what we’re doing next, and that’s a big part of it now. You’ve got to nurture your audience, right? I mean the social games understand that massively, and then the rest of us are just rushing to catch-up.

GC: I remember when Kickstarter seemed like the second coming but after playing the games, so many of them were disappointing. And I began to wonder whether answering to fans rather than publishers was necessarily any better. You’re still trying to please the guy with the money, and hoping he doesn’t lose interest.

LL: Well that’s true, and you do. We may Kickstart at some point, we’ve talked about that. But I think Oddworld properties take too much money to get a Kickstarter campaign to back ‘em. A number of different projects we’d like to do are more suitable, but ultimately if you’re getting the money from somewhere else… in our case we’re getting funded from sales. We’re not getting funded from pre-sales, which is what Kickstarter is.

So we keep it very simple, which is: if we make great stuff and we can just get it out there, onto digital network, it’s not going to disappear off the WalMart shelf next week because Final Fantasy is selling better. And that’s what used to happen. So you had like a weekend at retail and if it went s*****…

GC: That’s movies now, if it’s not a hit on the first day…

LL: It’s a blockbuster issue, right? I know those movie guys, those financiers, and they’ll tell you on Friday night what the life of that film will do. It’s a science. So while we say, ‘Well, the big publishers should do this…’ you have to understand their economic models, what do they need to have success and failure?

[At this point we’re interrupted for a final time by the PR woman]

GC: It’s his fault, he keeps being interesting!

LL: [laughs] Well it’s my pleasure, those were good questions. Really good questions.